Once the kabuki world had been broken into from above, the way was open for challenges from actors who would previously have been beneath the notice of the kabuki establishment. A group of untrained and fringe actors with a politically oppositional motivation achieved wild popularity from 1888 with short satirical sketches commenting on political events. The acting, relative to kabuki, was realistic and uninhibited. This work was taken further by enterprising actor-dramatist Otojiro Kawakami (), who in the mid-1890s took the Tokyo theatre world by storm by performing patriotic pieces on the subject of Japan’s first modern war (against China, 1894-5). Kawakami was also involved with other non-kabuki actors, and finally, after a ban since 1629, with actresses in the theatrical genre referred to generally as shinpa (‘new school’). This relatively realistic theatre, which took much of its material from the new literary genre of novels serialised in newspapers, adopted as its subject matter some of the social and interpersonal problems created by the changing society, and in the early 1900s almost threatened to eclipse kabuki.

Shinpa was new, and for a while powerful, but kabuki was still an overwhelming presence in Japanese theatre and shinpa began to acquire several of its characteristics. Its playwrights still wrote specifically for its actors and occupied a low position in the theatre hierarchy, as still did the generality of kabuki playwrights.